When you’re obsessively following football for two thirds of the year, creating your own fantasy league and working out the points accrued and lost every week, don’t you find there’s an empty space come the summer and the season ends?
Or, say you follow every single Grand Prix and bet on a big accumulator. What do you do when it’s all over for another year. That’s the problem with being an obsessive fan of any particular sport, you’re left bereft and with nothing to give your brain a workout in the times between seasons.
Well, now the UK football season has ended and there are no major sporting events lined up for 2013 (after the London Olympics last year, I think we’ve run out of that kind of enthusiasm!) we’ve been thinking of all sorts of ways you can keep yourself entertained in the few short weeks until the next football season kicks off.
Luckily, if you’ve been strictly an armchair football fan, we’ve found lots of ways for you to pass the time without even moving from your sofa.
Your salvation lies with online games, forums and console games. After all, if you have access to a PC you can play Football Manager to your heart’s content and relive the glory days of your favourite team. Or you could get on your console and get stuck into Fifa 14. But if you want a break from football and still want to exercise your grey matter, then how about some online brain training games?
There are absolutely loads of apps and games out there that promise to keep your brain in good nick – and a lot of them are free. If you have a Nintendo DS then you could play Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, one of the original and the best brain training games. But you could also go online and play the games on lumosity.com. You can set up your own profile and Lumosity will give you a personally devised brain training regime to get your brain working harder and harder.
Or if word games are more your thing, check out Words With Friends on Facebook and as a downloadable app for tablets and smartphones. Based on Scrabble it gives a fabulously usable platform to play your friends in endless word games – it can be pretty addictive trying to beat every single one of them!
Honing your word skills can become exhausting in itself, and this is when you might feel the need for a bit of light relief at an online casino, for example you may wish to play at intertops. Here you can casually play the slots, dip in and out of the odd game of roulette or chance your arm at poker – and you always have the added bonus of maybe winning some cash – can’t be a bad way to spend your down time as you grieve over Beckham’s retirement and gird your loins for the football season 2013/14.